Wireless

Speculation and rumor will tell you that next month Apple is set to introduce a low-cost phone. Some will argue this makes sense since Apple is competing in a field with other companies such as Samsung and HTC which produce devices across many price points. The question worth asking however is whether this strategy is logical in the long-run. After all, aren’t mobile devices the natural evolution of PCs and laptops and hasn’t Apple learned that to be successful in those markets, you want to stay as far away as you can from being seen as a low-cost, commodity electronics producer?

By now everyone knows there is a movie called Jobs which celebrates the life of Steve Jobs and tries to recreate the events which surround the tech legend’s life. Of course whenever such an ambitious project is undertaken, the challenge you have is getting agreement on what happened and just as importantly trying to get everyone involved in the happenings to work collaboratively.

It is apparent this movie faced some challenges in both regards. For example, Ashton Kutcher who plays a pretty convincing Steve Jobs complained recently that Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak aka “The Woz” is being paid by another company to support a different Steve Jobs film.

It’s getting to be laughable – the phone choices in the Android camp are literally becoming infinite from Samsung alone – let alone when you throw in Google, HTC and others. Apple popularized the mouse, the GUI, fonts, desktop publishing and so many things yet they eventually got killed in the late eighties and nineties because of the competition and their lack of correct response to it.

In other words the price/performance curve got so out of whack that when PCs became commoditized and Apple lost its software ecosystem advantage, it didn’t make financial sense to buy an Apple product.

In 2010 I predicted this would happen to Apple in the smartphone market when I saw the gloriously huge Motorola Droid X. At the time I said the following (bold added for emphasis):

How often do you get to take a piece of expensive electronics and treat it like it’s a bowling ball? The answer for me is not that often but that is exactly what I found myself doing with the InfoSonics verykool RS90 Vortex Smartphone. From the moment I received it, I have pummeled it, drowned it, bowled with it and literally dropped it on every surface I could find.

In March I detailed how Comverse Share is helping carriers integrate the best of social networking with their carrier offerings allowing a CSP to communicate with customers in an environment where they are spending more of their time. The integration of social into the typical service provider business model means carriers can use information from these networks to provide their customers offers on specific products and services. For example a sports fan could get an offer on a package which offers football video streaming.

In the above interview I spoke with Alice Bartram and last week I followed up with her and Mike Huffman in their Mass based headquarters to report on the latest offerings coming from her company.

One constant in business has been the ecosystem can be more important than the product. As an example, if a person is considering attending a conference, they typically look at the speakers and exhibitors to see if there is a fit before booking their trip. In other cases they will look to see who else is attending before they decide to pull the trigger. Over the last few decades a number of tech companies did their best to attract developers to their platforms to build their ecosystems.

If you have been following Google’s moves lately you see the company seems to have a laser focus on being a leader in a number of areas from autonomous cars to balloon-powered WiFi. Its important to point out there seems to be intense focus on competing with Apple with the introduction of solid products which are priced far lower than what Cupertino has to offer.

In the past five years, Google has launched an app store, an OS for mobile devices, smartphones, tablets and cloud-powered laptops. Now the company has unveiled Chromecast, a $35 dongle allowing streaming from mobile device to any television.

In short it takes on Apple TV to some degree and costs one-third as much.

The Boxer email client for iOS may be one of the better productivity tools you will find as it is easier to use in many ways than the native iOS e-mail app on the iPhone. I’ve been using Boxer for some months now and until the most recent version, 2.6.0, I didn’t feel comfortable recommending it. What has changed is the support of landscape mode when composing messages.

Perhaps the most important benefit of the app is the ability swipe a message to delete it while having a quick undelete available until you take another action within the app.

At one point in time HP had the best combination of mobile devices anywhere. They owned their own line of PDAs and also purchased Compaq who made the IPAQ – a game-changing device if there ever was one. The thing I liked about the IPAQ versus the Palm 7 which was a competitive device released around the same time was that COMPAQ decided to forego battery life for a bright color screen. In many ways the iPhone 5 reminds me of the first IPAQ device – especially when it prematurely runs out of battery power.

It is no secret that MDM is a huge market and Apple is in large part responsible for the trend where non-Microsoft and non-Blackberry devices infiltrated the enterprise. Moreover, corporate IT departments have huge budgets so if Apple came out with an MDM solution it could do exceedingly well in the market.

Writing for TMCnet, Joe Rizzo asks why Apple isn't in this market and he makes some good points.

You have to wonder however the predicament Cupertino is in at the moment.